The Golden Age of Light Music -Here’s To Holidays
Full contents list at end of review
rec.1953-62 GUILD LIGHT MUSIC GLCD 5205 [71:10]

There’s an enticing booklet cover for this release in Guild’s
gargantuan Light Music series. The summery feel announces holiday time in
the decade between 1953 and 1962. We journey by air, boat, spaceship (to Venus,
naturally), transcontinentally, and via camel, rickshaw, and highway. The
wasp-waisted, bronze-skinned lovely on the cover seems to have stayed at home,
but at least she’s blessed with good weather and pristine sand …
and at least her pooch hasn’t disgraced itself.

Wally Stott gets us underway with Skyways - Stott has given the Guild
team a number of headaches over his name but here they go formal and plump
for Walter. Thence we arrive at a series of destinations or evocatively titled
tracks that suggest the joys of wine and flirtation. Somewhat unexpectedly
Red Nichols turns up - a first appearance from him in this series - to parade
the praises of Indiana - an old Dixieland classic. If Nichols and his
‘Augmented Pennies’ - that is, there were more than the usual
five - seem somewhat strange, but welcome, bedfellows for this marque, a more
sleekly à la mode contribution comes from composer Iain Sutherland
whose Here’s to Holidays gives the disc its title track and does
so in bang-up-to-date School of ’62 fashion.

A Guild favourite - and mine - is Leonard Trebilco, who used the name Trevor
Duncan. The Wine Harvest isn’t quite as distinctive as his best
work but it’s well written and well played too, by Cedric Dumont and
the New Concert Orchestra on the Boosey & Hawkes label. A note about the
trawl through the various labels occasioned by a selection such as this: Vogue
Mode, Charles Brull/Harmonic, Liberty, Pye, Southern, De Wolfe, Reader’s
Digest, Chappell - and the expected bigger labels too. Just the names of the
labels should act as a conduit to the past, let alone the pieces themselves.

It’s good to hear the all-Australian Holiday Bound, written by
Clifton Johns and played by the Sydney Light Concert Orchestra on Columbia.
Ivor Slaney is a more regular contributor and Midsummer Madness features
Dolores Ventura doling out concertante Rachmaninovian asides galore. The Envoy
Strings bring some sheen and glamour in Transcontinental and Steve
Race paints a rather dapper Camel Train - rather more train than camel
- and there’s a bit of cowpokery to Mantovani’s own opus Rickshaw.
In contradistinction there’s a suave contribution from Hill Bowen in
Domenico Modugno’s Volare. A truly big finish is unleashed in
One Night in Monte Carlo, played - how appropriately - by the local
Light Symphony Orchestra.

Glamour, the joys of travel and the lure of romance announce post-war unshackling
in this astute selection.